Have you read anything by Kapuscinsky before? He's an excellent travel writer, a throwback to the times when your primary mode of transportation was confined to the elites and there were more places of mystery. Plus he writes in a John McPhee way of making everything interesting.

I read his earlier Imperium in which he travelled throughout Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia is a huge country with most of it being off the beaten path and full of interesting people who endured against repression. When I saw the current book a couple years ago at the Crewe annual book sale, I snagged it immediately.

This----> "Flynn plead guilty on 1 DEC 2017. We know with certainty he fully cooperated with the SC and after he had already plead guilty had 19 meetings lasting 62 hours and 45 minutes. Since he had already plead guilty, would Flynn have needed multiple lawyers representing him at that point? IANAL but my bet is no. My guess is he would only need one lawyer present at that point."

this discussion is like somebody trying to squeeze a balloon animal in their fists--- some of it always pops through the fingers. but i'll go along with it. (here's to pissin off the Pope and all his cardinals.)

here's where i'll start:

what the client believes is "needed" has little to do with actual deployment of a professional and aggressive law firm's service "machinery."

i'm not an attorney but i've consumed a significant amount of legal representation provided by "shiny window" high-rise firms.

attorneys with experience working inside such firms may have a deep and different understanding on this matter.

still. this limited perspective may prove useful to you.

Tom, if you are going to set up the Spygate screenplay to be realistic, the sting would have to remain realistic with regard to legal fees.

and since Flynn has top-shelf representation, there would at least need to be the appearance of payment for services rendered.

as you know, any client pays not only for a breathing body "to appear" as needed for many and varied reasons, in person or via the ether; a client pays a percentage of overhead costs.

as you also know, most law firms are run for profit meaning the fiduciary duty of senior partners is to get ROI on board investment, which means more than just achieving a positive gross margin.

to a penny-pinching client, and who isn't when one is of limited means and assets, the # of meetings, face-to-face consults, appearances yah-dah yah-dah tell only a part of the story about "the bill."

when faced with a suit in 2011 for trademarking issues, my partners and i paid most of the legal fees up front to cover the costs of using the army that backed up our corporate attorney of record.

factored into any prestigious firm's decision to take on a case is "opportunity cost", which you're already aware of is the cost of taking on "this" case and dedicating resources that may be applied to taking on another case, the returns on which are foregone in order to take on "this" case.

then there is the limitation imposed by not seeing an actual set of billings for this case.

what we paid our attorney wasn't shielded 100% by confidentiality. some of it was a matter of public record. but this might explain the absence of any absolute available accounting on the matter to date. a best guess estimate is a best guess estimate.

we were told what we paid for legal services in the trademarking suit was privileged information.

it was A LOT of money for paying the other side to "go away."

the billing was itemized, and to us it read much like the $500 aspirin tab from a hospital. wtf?

but without the actual bill, it seems the best we can do re Flynn is trust that the bill has not been a mere minor financial inconvenience.

AND, at $1000 per hour, 300 hours of billables reaches the $3m mark quickly. by your reporting of 62.75 hours for appearances and meetings, i'd say that 238 hours of billable time came from roughly 4 hours of overhead required to put a suit at the table, talking.

to limit the calculation to 62.75 hours is similar to saying that a college professor only appeared before its class teaching for 3 hours per week x 16 weeks, so it's only 48 hours. but what does it take to get that body, or a reasonable facsimile of that specific body, in front of a group of "dewy-eyed" undergrads who are paying $70K in tuition and "fees."

when taking into account what a high profile defense like Flynn's would require given Mueller's phalanx of zealous prosecutors and their penchant for "paper", 300 hours seems reasonable (b/c i don't have to pay it!).

if this is a sting, then perhaps the "burden" play by Flynn is backed by some marginal fees paid out of some escrowed, interest earning fund buried somewhere in the firm of record's accounting maze.

but we the audience would be expected to believe a Never Trumper legal beagle would be willing to persuade his partners that cut-rate billing is in their interest--- por que, Lucy?

have a great day, Tom. i won't be around to reply. but will take a look tonite before signing off. Baby Boy comes home from college tomorrow so i will be scarce. i'm a gmailer if you're interested in exploring this matter further. henry has it.

On Sept. 21, President Donald Trump signed a "minibus" appropriations law that funded the Department of Energy; Military Construction and Veterans Affairs; and the Legislative Branch for the entirety of fiscal 2019, which does not end until next Sept. 30. Then, on Sept. 28, Trump signed another "minibus" law funding the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS) and Education through the end of fiscal year 2019.
This means a total government shutdown cannot happen.

You are referring to Stalin's liquidation of the kulaks, mm, which killed between 6-8 million people in the Ukraine.
This is primarily where Walter Duranty earned his infamy as a propagandist for Stalin by reporting all was well, while people were eating their dead relatives to try and stave of Stalin's intentional starvation.

It is incredible that with a very strong dollar and virtually no inflation, the outside world blowing up around us, Paris is burning and China way down, the Fed is even considering yet another interest rate hike. Take the Victory!